After being a Chrome user for several years, I've switched back to Firefox for the past two years or so and I'm really, really happy with it.
Latest version does multi-processing, e10s is finally here (though it might still get disabled by usage of certain add-ons, I remember I had to force it to stay enabled).
On performance, in the past it felt sluggish, but now Firefox is fast and for my usage patterns it uses less memory than Chrome.
And one thing I really love is the Awesome Bar, which is a pain point every single time I open Chrome. I have a lot of websites I need to return to and in Chrome I end up searching on Google far more than I should. I guess that's the biggest difference between Firefox and Chrome, as Mozilla does not feel obligated to shareholders to extract ads clicks from you (although I hope that whatever they do keeps them afloat).
Also, tab management. I installed "Tab Center" from the Test Pilot and it's awesome. The experiment is now over unfortunately and the code itself for Tab Center isn't compatible with WebExtensions, but there's work going on to port it and that highlights that Firefox's WebExtensions will be more flexible than Chrome, if they aren't already.
But in the end I actually care more about trusting my browser and its maker to protect my interests. I actually trust Google more than I trust other companies, but something feels very wrong for a company to have so much leverage on me. Which is why, as long as I have a choice, I'll always prefer Firefox over Chrome, or Safari, or Edge.
To me, the best feature of Firefox compared to Chromium (both out of the box, no extensions. not sure if there are extensions that could help) is the address bar. Firefox does a fuzzy search into your browsing history and if you visit the same sites often, the suggestions are quite good.
Contrast this with Chrome, where the idea behind address bar user experience seems to be maximizing the number of Google searches done.
But the one that really keeps me on Firefox is Vimperator. It's the best keyboard oriented browser UI in mainstream browsers. The extensions available for Chrome are nowhere near as good (last time I tried).
The worst part of Firefox is the terribly long startup time. It can take up to 10 seconds after a reboot and takes quite a long time even with warm caches. Chromium startup is near instantaneous.
> The worst part of Firefox is the terribly long startup time. It can take up to 10 seconds after a reboot and takes quite a long time even with warm caches.
If you're the type with a lot of tabs open, that should improve a lot in the next few releases.
I'm not and I don't store/restore tabs on close, so that's not the case here. It's just Firefox + Vimperator + uBlock origin with about:blank as home page.
This is probably a good place to plug the fact that Vimperator is going to die with FF57 [1].
If anyone wants to help with making an alternative, look through that thread. I'm particularly invested in Tridactyl [2] but other people are working on others.
I've been using VimFX all along, which is actively maintained and already compatible with multiprocess.
It's a web browser, not an actual text editor. 99% of the time, you're just wanting familiar keyboard commands for navigation. It feels like Vimperator does so many impractical things almost tongue-in-cheek, just to show how cool it is that they're theoretically possible.
- You can use the current VimFx for the rest of 2017.
- Then, Vimium is your best bet: philc/vimium#2425
- VimFx is free software, so if somebody feels like converting it to a WebExtension they're totally free to do so! (But you're probably going to spend your time more wisely on Vimium.)
- I hope to create a new add-on with the best parts from VimFx some day.
- Firefox will become a better browser! It’s sad but worth the sacrifice.
I like that there's always more stuff to learn about Vimperator. It's fun. There's a nice thread on GitHub where people are talking about their favourite features:
Happens without any extensions. I'm on Arch Linux, not Ubuntu.
I don't care enough to debug it further. Firefox is stable enough these days that restarting it isn't even a daily occurence. I have enough patience to wait that 10+ seconds, it's just a minor annoyance.
I hope not. I believe that it is better for Firefox to be as light and bloat-free by default while users are free to install whatever addon provides any extra features that they need.
Tree Style Tab could be an opt-in functionality of vanilla Firefox, that wouldn't be an issue for new users.
Although I firmly believed that tabs on the side make more sense for any kind of users. Nesting tabs require a bit more practice though and that could be an opt-in option.
In my experience, whenever Firefox takes more than a couple of seconds to start up, I know my Internet connection is acting up. It appears to be doing some sort of blocking network lookup on the startup path, and opens the intial window only after it succeeds or times out.
Chrome might or might not suggest it when I start typing "logn...". But if I type "/logn" it's there immediately. They're tokenizing URLs in a stupid way, apparently.
> But the one that really keeps me on Firefox is Vimperator. It's the best keyboard oriented browser UI in mainstream browsers. The extensions available for Chrome are nowhere near as good (last time I tried).
Did you ever use vimium on chrome? It's part of what keeps me on Chrome, I remember I had a quick glance at Vimperator a fair while ago, but switched back to chrome as it was what I was used to. I keep wondering about trying again.
And by god is it fast now. I have in excess of 200 tabs open in various groups (RIP Tab groups), and didn't remember that my Firefox had updated. I open Firefox, see it startup instantly and my first reaction was that Firefox somehow forgot all the tabs that I had loaded and had just started a new window. Imagine my surprise when everything was just as I wanted!
You mention tab management. One of the main reasons I like Firefox is due to one, exemplary addon: Tab Mix Plus. It's the kind of tinker-y addon that lets you do almost anything that is typical for Firefox.
With ad-blocking especially, I just can't trust Google to be fully supportive. I mean, who are we kidding? It's literally their business model.
One thing I've been finding lately with firefox is that the Netflix website is abysmally slow. It lags on loading, goes unresponsive a lot etc etc.
I've always watched twitch in Chrome (second browser, other screen, works fine) because firefox used to be bad. It's likely that I will start doing the same with Netflix.
I use Firefox Mobile as well but to be fair extension-support is flakey. A lot of times I install an extension that doesn't work and nothing indicates whether it does or doesn't. Also the extensions store doesn't indicate whether and extension is mobile friendly or not.
Oh man plugin support on mobile, this is a game changer for me. If only Firefox supported 2fa with an authenticator app I would have no hesitation using Firefox as my main browser.
> Latest version does multi-processing, e10s is finally here (though it might still get disabled by usage of certain add-ons, I remember I had to force it to stay enabled).
Are multi-processing and e10s separate things?
How do you forcefully enable it? 5/7 of my addins are listed as Legacy so I am still in single process mode, I am dying to try multi-process!
I like a lot the "tabs outliner" extension for Chrome. It's especially useful when you work with many tabs open at the same time, and want to preserve sessions, etc. Unfortunately there is now alternative to that in Firefox. Session Manager comes close, but is painful to use.
So I'm still looking forward to such extension for Firefox, because honestly I prefer FF to Chrome for most of the things.
I've tried it. Three times, I guess, since the early versions of it.
All three times I found it useless even though I usually have 30+ tabs opened.
Honestly, this kind of statement is nothing but a superstition that you usually hear from people that think that it's impossible to be productive using different approaches.
For me nothings beats Vimium's "T" or Session Buddy + Keepin' Tabs extensions pair.
That is odd, you should try to use for longer periods of time. I personally use it with hundreds of tabs open and I haven't found anything else that can compare.
> Honestly, this kind of statement is nothing but a superstition that you usually hear from people that think that it's impossible to be productive using different approaches.
Maybe, but I'm pretty sure I'm more productive than you. We should compare each other browsing reddit some day.
>That is odd, you should try to use for longer periods of time. I personally use it with hundreds of tabs open and I haven't found anything else that can compare.
I'm using fork when eating pasta. Still, my chinese friends tell me that nothing beats sticks and I should just try to use them for longer periods of time.
See what I did here?
Your assumtion is baseless. You don't know for how logh I've been using it, nor do you know about the results (aside from the fact that I don't use it anymore).
>Maybe, but I'm pretty sure I'm more productive than you. We should compare each other browsing reddit some day.
I'm sorry, but "browsing reddit" and "productive" are on opposite sides of scale for me.
You are entitled to your opinion, no matter how childish it may be.
Perhaps the biggest reason I use Firefox is for Tree Style Tabs. I've tried to find something equivalent in Chrome.
I installed Tab Outliner briefly, and honestly, I couldn't figure out what the heck it was trying to do. Maybe my mental capacity is too limited, but as far as I could tell it didn't get me one iota closer to my goal. What I've settled on, for the times when I need to use Chrome, is an external helper app called Sidewise.
So Tab Outliner needs to do a LOT more to make its operation more discoverable if it wants more users.
Also keep in mind that Mozilla is researching better rendering methods through the Quantum project. The potential boost will be huge -- CSS styling and compositing will be faster, JS code that interacts with the DOM will be faster, etc.
I'm very excited about Quantum CSS and Quantum DOM landing.
> It baffles me that some people thinks Firefox is becoming a “Chrome clone”, it’s just not the case, it’s just plain silly to make such statement.
That's probably the single most reassuring statement about Firefox that I've heard in some time, coming from a serious dev who makes a popular cross-platform addon for both Firefox and Chrome.
I think as an extension developer he is particularly sensitive to the tech behind Firefox, which makes him understand some of Mozilla's decisions. For example, the move from legacy add-ons to WebExtensions is surely one less maintenance burden for Mozilla.
As a user who doesn't think about such issues, it terribly looks like it's becoming a Chrome clone. I think it's Mozilla's responsibility to have a clearer communication if that's not the case.
Also, the move to WebExtensions is a move to a more secure extension model. Traditional XUL extensions were comparable to the extension developer compiling their own code into the browser. Yikes.
WebExtensions should be better sandboxed and have better permissions management.
You can't get those security benefits if you allow older XUL extensions to stick around. You have to sunset XUL extension at some point.
And, similarly, you can't go to any sort of multiprocess architecture (or multithread) model if extensions can mutate more or less anything at any point, and that's not just about security, that's also about what plenty of users have been asking for for years—performance.
> Also, the move to WebExtensions is a move to a more secure extension model. Traditional XUL extensions were comparable to the extension developer compiling their own code into the browser. Yikes.
Not if you previously moved to the Jetpack, err addon-sdk with cfx, err jpm tool. Now there's yet-another API to move to. At least this one will make it easier to develop portable extensions (but still not straight-forward).
To be perfectly honest I'm not at all interested in "better permissions" for plugins when it comes with the removal of flexibility that you get for free. If I've got plugin-installing malware on my system, I've got worse problems than a rogue plugin.
Give me more useful over more secure any day of the week.
But the flexibility did not come for free!
Whenever they changed internal interfaces, they'd either have to create a clone, call it interface2 or break all extensions using them. That's for internal interfaces.
The new model also means actual public support for a well-defined API. It's so much better for developers.
Besides, it also enables some big performance and security wins.
It's not entirely unreasonable. We use software because it's useful. If you make it so secure that it is no longer useful, what have you got left?
In the case of Firefox extensions, I'm aware of the risks of the old model, but the fact is that the only observable difference it has made to me so far is that when I accidentally hit back on a page with an unsubmitted form the other day I lost about 20 minutes' worth of work, because the extension I used to use that would have saved everything automatically no longer works. This is not progress.
Lazarus: Form Recovery hasn't been maintained in years. But I don't think there's anything about it that can't be done with web extensions. There's already one that has the base functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cach...
With the appropriate extension this can be made seemless. Hit a hotkey get an emacs buffer with the current contents of input box. Write some stuff and save and quit. Input box now contains contents of emacs buffer. Annoyingly this requires a service that sits in the background in chrome because security wont let chrome launch such a process. In chrome you can use text-aid-too. Pentadactyl/vimperator can do it with firefox and others.
My earlier mistake was clicking to focus on my Firefox window but not quite on the form text area I was aiming for, and then trying to delete the last word I had typed. Your tip would have saved me on that occasion.
The idea that the XUL extension model is necessary for a browser to be useful is obviously false. The majority of Web users use browsers that do not have a XUL extension model.
(And, of course, I don't believe your desired functionality is incompatible with Web Extensions anyhow.)
That was the practical result of the change we're talking about for this user, regardless of any theoretical benefits elsewhere or any theoretical ability to provide equivalent functionality within the new architecture.
Other people are welcome to use other browsers, but I was using Firefox, and a big reason I was still using Firefox despite various other changes I didn't particularly want was the range of useful extensions I could choose from.
I guess you would lose some of your remaining market share to chrome and wonder how much smaller your revenue is going to be when the yahoo deal expires?
> I guess you would lose some of your remaining market share to chrome
So, you're saying that:
- some people kept using Firefox because it had more powerful extensions than Google Chrome.
- these people are upset because mozilla is breaking the old extensions in favor of a less powerful alternative (still better than Chrome's, that the main point of the OP)
- then people are going to move to Google Chrome which still is the worst browser for extensions
Who reasons this way ? There are legitimate reasons for being upset (my favorite addon disapeared and that makes me sad / I need to rewrite all my addons, depending if you're a user or an addon dev), but I don't think anyone will shoot himself in the foot and use a worse (addon-wise at least) alternative just because mozilla's people are mean !
The idea is for extensions to have the flexibility they have had. I don't think anyone would object to WebExtensions if it didn't cripple or make existing extensions impossible to exist in the future.
Also, this interest is not about the majority of the users. This is about the users who know about Firefox extensions and use a bunch of them everyday! I know my life has certainly become more productive and less stressful with several extensions than without. In my experience, Firefox extensions have also historically been of better quality and reliability compared to Chrome extensions. For now, I have just two examples for my case - switching proxy servers and saving/restoring browser sessions. I use Firefox extensions that work beautifully, and just as one would expect (they're Foxy Proxy and Session Manager), but similar extensions in Chrome don't work and I always end up fighting more with the browser and the extensions to have a better experience. To this day, I can't trust Chrome to restore a crashed session on the first (re)launch. So I use Chrome more as a one-off browser once in a while and try to avoid having long running sessions (my browser sessions on Firefox can span several days, weeks or sometimes even months).
My opinion is that technically savvy people must use their knowledge and influence to guide others to use things that make life easier and better. I have been following this myself by encouraging people to use Firefox and by showing them some great extensions to have.
The majority of Web users use browsers that do not have a XUL extension model
And the majority of these users may have no idea what an extension is either. That doesn't mean all browsers should be dumbed down to cater to the lowest-common-denominator who will manage to infect themselves regardless of how featureless and "secure" browsers become.
> The idea that the XUL extension model is necessary for a browser to be useful is obviously false. The majority of Web users use browsers that do not have a XUL extension model.
I explicitly preferred Firefox over every other browser I ever tried because its extensions were more powerful and more abundant, and it appears likely that this was due to XUL providing deep access to extensions. You can't just say that others didn't have a feature if that feature was a key differentiator!
I'd like better permissions, but not at the cost of a more flexible, customisable browser than chrome. There should be reasons to use firefox above and beyond muscle memory.
This would help all the individuals who have inadvertently installed malware addons which do not have pwned systems as soon as there are any, if there are ever any.
But as a user, you're probably just going to want to know if there is an extension that does what you need. Are you worried about the underlying APIs if you're not a developer?
I don't care for myself, but the author of one of my favorite extensions has stated that he's not porting to a webextension because he doesn't want to rewrite (again) and because (at the time he looked, at least) the APIs didn't really support it. I don't care about the API directly, but I absolutely care when they're insufficient.
> For example, the move from legacy add-ons to WebExtensions is surely one less maintenance burden for Mozilla.
On the other hand it is an annoyance for many extension developers and users of those extensions. Half of the extensions i use (like DownThemAll, FireFTP and MAFF) are not WebExtensions compatible and there aren't any alternatives.
I think I preferred it, but what killed Opera for me was being bought by a Chinese company + seeing what that company did to Opera Max (which I thought was a "killer app" before the acquisition).
It never did - Opera was killed just after Kestrel, and a new Chrome clone was slapped with the logo and name. There is no Opera, and hasn't been for some time.
"Chromium-based browsers are being “infested” by Instart Logic tech which works around blockers and worst, around browser privacy settings (they may start “infecting” Firefox eventually, but that is not happening now)."
From his linked post:
"Instart Logic will detect when the developer console opens, and cleanup everything then to hide what it does"
Is this implemented via a CDN-delivered script? Why would Chromium-based browsers be more susceptible?
There's another one I can't find, but it writes out things like "user moved mouse to x,y. User has been idle for 10 seconds, page lost focus, page gained focus" .. kinda creepy how much is available to the Javascript engine.
Elephant Games are incredible and their creator is also imcredible. I highly recommend checking out his other games if you haven't already. http://www.jmtb02.com/
Firefox no longer reports installed plugins to websites. It causes some interesting behavior on websites that check to see if you have flash before letting you play games (sorry, you need to have flash installed). I had a user script for a while that 'fixed' the navigator.$whatever to show having flash installed so I could play some game; now I just use Shumway and it seems to work.
The difference is that you run only trusted native applications with the ability to check their source code, while you are visiting untrusted sites which often have obfuscated javascript.
I think that it would be a better comparison between a pdf file and the web: pdfs files can't do the same or more.
And I would argue it is harder for the average user to view the JavaScript inside PDFs: on the web just right click and choose Inspect Element right in the browser; for a PDF you'll have to use specialized tools to decode the myriad encoding schemes inside a PDF. The average JavaScript developer doesn't know how to extract JavaScript from a PDF.
While it works on Chromium it does not seem to work in xpdf, pdf.js nor any other pdf viewer that I tried. It seems that JS, flash, etc inside pdfs are proprietary, useless, and potentially dangerous adobe-only extensions that nobody else implements and nobody uses. It's just that Chromium happened to have a JS engine so they decided to let JS inside pdfs to be executed with a very constrained API (which can't do anything malicious probably - unless a bug is found in its JS engine).
My point still stands: I do not expect a pdf document to be able to do anything like the djsumdog's link and neither do most people. If a pdf document was able to do anything like that I would consider that viewer as broken.
> The average JavaScript developer doesn't know how to extract JavaScript from a PDF.
I would suspect it's sniffing for the window-size suddenly changing in certain ways, perhaps along with watching for the normal dev-tools keyboard shortcuts via keydown listeners. I can't actually remember off the top of my head if Chrome suppresses the event in that case, but it wouldn't be surprising if it didn't.
The easy check for this would be to see whether opening the devtools in detached mode via the menus makes it notice.
Note that this would actually be quite a pain to hide from the page, just because it's something the page needs to know to display some stuff and make rendering calculations. If it was hidden from the page, we'd suddenly be complaining about debugging floating footers which are hiding under the devtools.
But there's different ways of opening dev tools. You can use the mouse to right click as well.
In fact, when using keyboard shortcuts in the better these days, I have a habit of hitting alt+D first to get to the address bar first (Outlook likes to hijack browser shortcuts like Ctrl+n), in which case the website shouldn't know I'm pressing anything at all.
I think OP's point is you can listen for a bunch of signals: If you see the right keydown events, or if you see a contextmenu followed by a rapid change to innerWidth, they probably opened dev tools, and you should delete your evil cookies.
The person who figured this out probably opened them via menu and had dev tools in another window, so the evil folks couldn't detect the resize.
If people would focus on content in HTML and CSS for layout and newfad devs weren't shoving 50 jscripts a page down our throat this wouldn't be happening as bad. I plan to make all my future sites librejs compatible, and forgoe js altogether whenever possible.
I've been using uMatrix for over three years and very very few websites don't work with it.
By far the most annoying 'feature' (more of a consequence of the internet) is the way that you can't whitelist HTTPS sub-domains. (Makes AWS Console a pain.)
Does AWS Console have much that needs blocking? Seems a reasonable place to simply turn off uMatrix. You could also simply use a second browser with uBlock Origin for a limited number of sites - I tend to do that for a lot of checkout /payment options where the repeated reloads of whitelisting in uMatrix could be troublesome.
> I'm trying DuckDuckGo, but it's just not as good.
It took me a while of using DDG before I realized how much I had equated "good" with "looks like Google".
What finally hit me, hard, was that I switched the DDG theme to a color scheme designed to look like Google search results, and all of a sudden the results "felt better". Markedly better.
So, I started regularly comparing results, every time I found something that I felt I didn't get the results I expected for. I would search, and then search again with !g. And almost every time I ran into something that I didn't like the DDG results for, the Google results weren't actually any better. (The rare times they were, I reported that, and often it got fixed.)
I use "!s" in DDG to get to Startpage [1] search results. One letter shorter to access the same - no need to type "!sp" when one can just type "!s" instead. :)
This does not work for replacing "!spi" (image search on Startpage) though. Using "!si" does a search on a non-existent subdomain sportsillustrated.cnn.com.
My problem is not the looks, whenever I use !g I'm annoyed how bad it looks. It IS the results. Often when something doesn't have a ton of relevant results, DDG gives the wrong results while !g has what I'm looking for.
In my experience ddg is less contextual. For instance when searching for something that is trending, Google will often give the most expected results even if the search keywords are incredibly vague, while ddg will give more standard results respecting the keywords.
That’s the very reason I switched to ddg, but it bites me back everytime I try to catch up on stuff everybody already knows for days, and need to fallback to !g.
Oh, I'm pretty sure that's why. Unless encrypted.google.com doesn't use that information? Anyway, I'd love to have some way to personalize my DDG results and tell them what to boost. Alas.
How often do you end up at Google though; a few years back I tried DDG for a couple of months but ended up basically always doing !g and so went back to Google.
It depends on what I'm searching for. If its an error code or something a bit esoteric around tech then google usually has better results, but for everyday topics the results are pretty decent, and they feel like they have improved over the years.
I probably do less searching than I used to, but the bang system really helps me search other sites much more effectively. The more common bangs I use are !w for wikipedia, !so for stackoverflow, !imdb, !gh, !tpb, !bm for bing maps, !bi bing images.
!sp for startpage is really nice to use if you want to have the Google results without the tracking.
Edit: looks like this was already mentioned below. Whoops.
I don't have any figures to back this up, but I feel like I use !g about half of the time (it may be 70 or 20% as well since I have no data). I'm not free from Google then, but this reduced my dependency by about 50%, which is still good to take !
I was in the same situation. Switched over again a few months back. I almost always only need to use !g for rare results (and even there it doesn't always help). On the other hand bangs like !mdn (mozilla developer network) and !w (wikipedia) make things much easier.
I use Firefox "awesomebar" keywords so "w" for Wikipedia, etc. (I think Chrome has this too), so I don't gain anything really with DDG's keywords on most searches.
I basically only use Google for movie listings, calculations, and restaurant hours now. The rare times I switch to Google for other searches DDG fails on, Google is no better.
I follow a three step model:
1. DDG
2. If that doesn't help, then use !s to search Startpage.
3. If that doesn't help, then use !g to search Google.
Other than the relevance and quality of search results, there are differences in features across these sites, like date range search, for example. Image search also seems to have more flexibility on Google. I haven't checked recently if reverse image search even exists on DDG or Startpage.
Same for me. I fired up Firefox for the first time in years and it works great. The hardest part to get used to is their super-weird hamburger menu layout.
What Ankit The mobile menu? The mobile menu is a mess if you have extensions installed, because add-on developers don't put their stuff in the tools/page submenu, and there's no way to rearrange it.
> The purpose of Instart Logic technology is to disguise 3rd-party requests as 1st-party requests, thus bypassing content blockers, and even the ability of browsers to block 3rd-party cookies (because they are stored as 1st-party cookies):
And he has a list of sites that use WebRTC to get around blocking. Didn't Firefox or someone say they'd reconsider auto-enabling WebRTC if this practise became widespread?
"Web publishers make simple DNS changes to flow the network domains that carry their HTML through the Instart Logic system. This allows our system to inject a small piece of JavaScript that can detect the presence of ad blockers. When an ad blocker is detected, the JavaScript-based virtualization layer Nanovisor, together with our intelligent cloud-based, machine learning platform, encrypts and delivers all the elements of the page using the customer’s existing delivery services.
As a result, each resource on the page, and any signals and actions such as measurement beacons or user clicks, will have its URL encrypted and obscured. This renders ad blockers ineffective, as they can no longer search for patterns which would indicate a resource is related to advertising.
The result is simply the experience that the web publisher intended on delivering to the end user with no changes to the ad delivery or measurement systems; end users have no need to be aware the technology is even being used."
This is basically how viruses get around antivirus. I think the virus/antivirus arms race has been more or less won by viruses, so it looks like this is the end state of the adblock wars.
Chromium-based browsers are being “infested” by Instart Logic tech
which works around blockers and worst, around browser privacy
settings (they may start “infecting” Firefox eventually, but that
is not happening now).
Okay, so they have cookies on a subdomain of the main site's domain. But that in itself is not a problem, since it does not enable them to track me across websites. So I don't have a problem with that, unless they use other tricks. Are they using browser profiling or something similar to correlate across websites?
Hadn't heard about this, but this is why I still keep long blacklist in my /etc/hosts file even though I use uBlock Origin also.
Out of habit I get mine from http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm. Not sure it's the best one, but I started using it years ago when I was still using Windows and have just stuck with it.
I'm pretty sure there might be a bug for this in the Chromium bug tracker that is hidden from the common folk, just like they hide their bug where websites can detect if you're in private mode(!):
Afaik there's no ad-blocking extension for Chrome for Android which I find pretty telling. I'm using Firefox on Android and the ad-blocking (less traffic, less blink-blink animations and less CPU consumption) make mobile browsing a night-day difference
There's no extensions on Android Chrome, and the reason is simple: if they enable extensions, people will mostly install ad blockers and that's bad for business at Google
One thing I learned several years ago when I decided to jump on the bandwagon and try Chrome was that Chrome was unable to safely block javascript the way NoScript does because the plugin framework doesn't allow a plugin to block Javascript before it's loaded.
So all the noscript equivalent for Chrome could offer was to block Javascript after it had loaded. Which seemed unreal and pointless.
So I stayed on Firefox. Because I've been convinced for many years now that Javascript plays a major role in malware delivery through the browser.
And along with email the browser is the major delivery platform for malware.
Chrome can block JavaScript before it's loaded, its what uBlock Origin does and others as well (using the WebRequest API available to Chrome extensions)
It's important to know that NoScript does far more than block JavaScript; just look up its ABE component, for example.
For technical users, uMatrix' interface is an amazing achievement in, effectively, managing application firewall rules. It's breathtakingly efficient in both communicating active settings to the user and in configuring new rules. I wish my actual firewalls used that interface.
The advantage of Firefox's NoScript plugin is that it can be selective.
Say you randomly visit a site and want to temporarily allow the javascript it uses to do its thing, but you don't want to allow any other javascript on the page such as facebook's and google's. The built-in chrome javascript blocker doesn't let you pick and choose temporary permissions at that moment.
I think I qualify as a poweruser by some standards, I tend to have 100's of tabs open and I've never left Firefox for speed reasons or others because it has held up extremely well over the years. My machine has a lot of RAM so maybe that's one reason things have been quick, and the main drive is an SSD. Is there anything specific about the 57 release that makes you feel caused the speed bottle-neck to disappear?
57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine.
Broay this is because quantum is much further along in nightly than on the other channels. Specifically, they're more aggressive with multithreaded settings, multiprocess is enabled, and the quantum css component is turned on, too.
Is also helps that we compare to chrome. On Linux chrome doesn't even do GPU rendering. So the HN crowd probably has a disproportionately bad experience with it
> 57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine
As others have said here, I just installed Firefox Nightly after reading this, and you're 100% correct. I think it might even be faster than Chromium for me.
Wait, what? I know that hw accelerated video decoding is generally not available on linux chrome, but I'm pretty sure that lots of other things are. From my chrome://gpu
Firefox has always been unbearably slow on Linux for me. It's the main reason I swapped to Chrome in the first place. I tried switching back to Firefox about 6 months ago, same problem of extremely slow and laggy UI. Interesting to hear 57 is faster now, it may be worth trying again.
Have you tried using a fresh profile, just to narrow the possible variables?
If you've checked both of those things, and you can characterize the slowness in the context of specific operations (e.g. what "laggy" means, precisely), then I'd recommend filing a bug and working with the developers to track down the problem. Because that is not normal.
Firefox 57 should be a much, much improved experience. e10s with multiple processes started rolling out to users in Firefox 54 and tons of small performance issues have been fixed in 55-57.
On Linux, manually enabling GPU acceleration as user ac29 describes below can a big difference. Unfortunately, a lot of Linux GPU drivers have issues that prevent acceleration from being enabled by default for some users.
Same here, it's why I switched to Vivaldi. I had to restart Firefox every day or so and it still lagged. I've read the other recent post on here that shows 100+ tabs has almost no startup burden in FF57 compared to previous builds. I should try it again.
For those who don't notice the speed, multiprocess may be disabled due to certain addons. Go to about:support to check if it enabled. The addon compatibility checker addon can tell you which are the offending addons. For me 1password was the big blocker, but they recently released a beta that works with the new API. Sorry for the lack of links, I'm on mobile.
Oh interesting. Firefox still seems slow and a bit of a memory hog compared to Chrome on my machine. Sure enough I checked and three add-ons are marked as legacy (and presumably disabled the multiprocess stuff): uBlock Origin, Websocket Disabler, and NoScript.
I may have to try Firefox again once 57 is in portage. A few months back I switched to Vivaldi, begrudgingly. I really liked Firefox, but the speed issues were becoming unbearable.
Vivaldi has been a lot faster and mostly an alright experience, and I've watched many of the issues I've found for it get addresses in recent builds. Still there are many things I miss about Firefox, not to mention supporting that community and the browser I've used for well over a decade (including back when it was Phoenix, the original Mozilla and the old Netscape 6 that proceeded them).
How has the nightly been for you in terms of stability? Been thinking of switching to it from beta. The memory issues on MacOS are killing me, and I believe there are fixes in nightly now.
IME, desktop nightly hasn't ever outright crashed (less lucky with mobile nightly). Sometimes I notice minor rendering glitches on various sites, but I also have Servo's CSS engine enabled which might be doing it (it's not yet the default).
Well, it used to crash a lot at some point : when e10s was first activated by default in Nightly (in 2013 IIRC) it crashed several times a day. I stopped using nightly for a year afterwards.
Slightly OT: is that what a 'Discourse' page looks like? It's pretty awful: it will automatically update the URL as you scroll past each post in any direction, while breaking the Back button, so good luck getting back to the original post, since neither clicking on Back nor reloading the page will get you there. Basic UX failure.
It looks like a feature to me : this way when you copy the address it links directly to the right comment. Of course this comes at the expense of a working back button.
The page is using Location.replace[0] to update the URL and replaces the current history entry without affecting back/forward behavior on pretty much any browser.
The one downside is that the URL may no longer point to the comment you were originally linked to.
Keep in mind that it's not within Google's incentives to facilitate ad-blocking and prevention of tracking. After all, that's where the lion's share of their revenue comes from. However, Mozilla is free to actively support such efforts.
Good point. Mozilla made most of their money from Google, and other advertisers, iirc. "More free" might've been prudent.
You make a good observation about Safari too. Apple doesn't make much money from advertising--they still sell hardware. They can provide privacy to users at little expense to their core business.
> Mozilla made most of their money from Google, and other advertisers, iirc.
The much bigger problem is webpage owners which lose almost all incentive to support Firefox, if it blocks their ads. You'd have broken webpages all over the place.
Just like in IE/Edge, the "Do not track" setting used to be enabled by default, then it became disabled by default, and for good reason. The argument is, if it is enabled by default, sites will not bothered to support it since it was not something that the user turned on explicitly and was aware of.
I agree. Not just that, I would add that Google's incentive is often to encourage usage of these services despite being a detriment to the user. To this day, Android still does not have Night Mode built in probably because so people would simply use the device more instead of going to sleep.
Opt out adblocking should be the number 1 differentiator as it has the biggest impact on browsing including performance, security and eye sore. It is borderline negligence that moz://a is not pushing it while Google and co are lubing up users with their Acceptable Ads nonsense.
Market share has already been on the rise again since Firefox 48, which was the release that shipped the separation of the UI and content in two processes.
People here probably didn't notice right away, since you pretty much had to have no extensions installed for a long time for it to be enabled, but casual users seem to have noticed...
uBlock Origin on Firefox would be more powerful than uBlock Origin on Chrome, but does it mean that uBlock Origin webextension on Firefox will be as powerful as uBlock Origin "legacy" Firefox extension ?
This is a post of gorhill from the last months Firefox - Google Analytics fiasco:
> Legacy uBlock Origin can block the network request to GA.
> However webext-hybrid uBO as per Network pane in dev tools does not block it. Same for pure webext Ghostery, the network request to GA was not blocked, again as per Network pane in dev tools.
> What is concerning is that both uBO webext-hybrid and Ghostery report the network request to GA as being blocked, while it is really not as per Network pane in dev tools. It's as if the order to block/redirect the network request was silently ignored by the webRequest API, and this causes webext-based blockers to incorrectly and misleadingly report to users what is really happening internally, GA was not really blocked on about:addons, but there is no way for the webext blockers to know this and report properly to users.
I know that, thanks. I posted it as a real life example of where webextensions are still not as powerful as the so called legacy extensions and wonder if that specific case still applies, is it fixed, planning to be fixed, or are there other specific examples where webextensions fall short.
Yeah, that specific case wasn't fixed; it appears that Mozilla doesn't intend to let addons run on `about:`. However, they did make `about:` respect DNT by disabling GA.
WebExtensions currently fall short when it comes to any addon that modifies the UI significantly (tree-style tabs etc), though it's been mentioned in some other comments here that they're talking to addon devs to extend the API where possible.
Couldn't the devtools listener shenanigans be solved merely by putting a "pause" button in the browser chrome (possibly through an extension)? Browsers are already throttling CPU usage when the tab isn't visible, so it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to just throttle to 0 with a toggle.
Even better-- have the pause button in devtools window, "pause" by default when you open devtools, and then unpause once something gets mutated/re-layout'd.
I guess you'd still need to protect the devtools shortcut key so that any DOM shenanigans are guaranteed to get invoked after the devtools listener. But browsers already have all kinds of crazy edge-cases in the name of security (e.g., no manual triggering of <select> menu). Keeping polymorphic worms from corrupting the devtools state seems rather important by comparison.
> It baffles me that some people thinks Firefox is becoming a “Chrome clone”, it’s just not the case, it’s just plain silly to make such statement.
If you use a much narrower definition of "clone" than is typically used in this context, then sure. If, however, you use "clone" a bit more flexibly, and note the word "becoming", then it's a different story. That's not to say that Firefox won't be better than Chrome, and it's certainly not to say that it won't have any advantages over Chrome, but it is giving up some of its major current advantages.
I am considering going back to FF, but it seems FIDO U2F still isn't done completely and the U2F Extension for FF is not working anymore since the WebExtension switch.
Please correct me if missed something, but i think i have to hold off for a little bit longer.
I love the principle, but I can't use it with AWS, I can't use it with my bank, I can't use it with my domain registrar, and I can't use it with Office 365.
That is my understanding as well. I haven't been able to get my U2F working on recent Firefox builds. It's such a shame because I really want to use U2F instead of an authenticator app. I have like 20 different sites in there and finding the right number always takes me a minute or two.
I've been really disappointed with the direction Firefox has been moving since they decided to make changes that would permanently break some of their most powerful and useful extensions, like Pentadactyl.
As someone who uses WebRTC to deliver real value (I'm an engineer @ Peer5 YC W17) - this abuse of WebRTC is awful.
I think WebRTC related tooling should get a lot better - and extensions should be able to hook into WebRTC calls just as easily as they do to regular functions.
Websites can just grab a fresh copy of RTCPeerConnection from a different realm anyway (an iFrame in this case) - it looks like uBlock is mostly stuck (unless it prevents sites from opening said realms).
I still think Chrome has some advantages. For example you can disable a lot of things like location services in the settings. In Firefox you can decline access to location once a site asks for it but I would rather disable it once and for all if I am setting up a machine for a less tech-savvy person.
Also, firefox comes with tons of built in features you cannot disable. In past they have caused security issues (e.g. the pdf.js exploit).
> I would doubt it. The experience that pdf.js provides is inferior to dedicated programs like xpdf.
That's not the point, I open dozens of PDF daily and I don't want to have to switch programs all the time. An integrated light PDF viewer is one of the best new feature of modern browsers.
PS: You can set the pdfjs.disabled pref to true on the about:config page to disable the build-in PDF viewer
I will admit that I just took pawadu's word for it. I personally had no idea if it is possible to disable pdfjs or not.
That being said, I will also agree that it is convenient sometimes but it is much slower and much less compatible than native viewers, making it useless for me about half the time. Still, I see no reason why it needs to be integrated into firefox instead of being just an addon (even if it is installed by default).
Unfortunately Brave doesn't have extensions and won't let you restore some settings from backup or transfer them to another PC, so it's not really a complete browser for most techies the way we think of Chrome and Firefox. Note that the settings loss thing is an issue (ehem "feature") with Chrome/Chromium itself and not specific to Brave on Windows builds.
I would love to use Firefox for it's privacy credibility, the Awesome Bar and to prevent monopolization of the Web.
Unfortunately 2017 is the year of the CPU usage apocalypse on the Web. Go to this insane Guardian page, scroll down a page, and observe what happens for a minute or two perhaps scrolling down some more: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/10/adele-vocal-cor...
The numbers keep jumping around a lot, but very roughly what I'm seeing is this:
(100% is one CPU core. I'm not using any ad-blockers)
Obviously, these numbers are non-deterministic and depend on the individual ads that are being displayed. But the numbers are roughly representative of what I've been seeing over the last couple of months.
1. With uBlock Origin running, I don't go above 11% CPU
2. I turned uBlock Origin off: reloading immediately sent my CPU to 80%, and it *stabilised* at a constant 30%.
As I said, it's non-deterministic, so I'm not surprised if you're seeing something different.
I have made it a habit to try resource hungry pages in all my browsers. The variance is huge but the pattern is pretty clear when it comes to CPU usage, especially between Safari and everyone else (excluding Edge and IE as I don't use Windows).
Which version of Firefox is that? It recently became much faster, and is set to see yet another improvement with version 57 (due in three months, I believe).
Try nightly. Or even FF 55. There's a huge chasm of difference - they put a huge focus on performance improvement the past couple of development cycles.
Alright, that's supposed to already be a lot better (although, as said, it will get even better). You might want to check about:support, and see what it says next to "Multiprocess Windows". If that's disabled, then you won't see the speedups from 54 (and it will usually give a hint about why it's disabled).
IIRC, stylish for chrome converts userstyles into javascript, and runs the scripts to add inline styles to elements on the page. stylish for firefox changes the page's stylesheet.
I heard somewhere that Firefox's security showing was pretty dismal before they introduces e10s with seccomp-bpf sandboxing. The anecdote I heard was that in "hacking competitions" a Chrome vulnerability was worth a serious hunk of cash, Firefox was worth almost nothing because it was too easy. After sandboxing, Firefox RCEs are worth money again. Does anyone know whether this claim is accurate or misleading? I know I've switched back to Firefox because of it.
The claim is correct. The security of IE9+, Edge and Chrome is far superior than Firefox. As Geohot said, writing an exploit for Firefox is similar to a harder CTF challenge (done in an day or two). While IE or Chrome Exploits cost a lot. I can back it up with references, but https://www.zerodium.com/program.html shows a pretty clear picture (Scroll down to Payout Ranges). It will take FF like 3-5 years until they have a sandbox as good as the other Browsers, sadly.
I was viewing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox and it appears that Firefox on Linux now has some kind of sandboxing. I presume it's not as good as Chrome but I'm sure it's raised the security level significantly. Realistically, how much danger am I in by using Firefox?
Web/browser Extensions is a terrible standard is it EXTREMELY limiting for power users.
While that my not impact a ad blocker, there are countless extensions that can not work with Web Extensions and will make Chrome err sorry Firefox far less appealing to people.
For me, more than a few of the extensions I use regularly are not compatible with Web Extensions, and a few of them that are critical to my productivity are in limbo still
That is the Source of the "Chrome Clone". The switch to Web Extensions is hated by many many firefox power users.
Sadly they feel the users that have stuck around all of these years, that did not abandoned them for Chrome are worthless, and have chosen to attempt to attract those users that did abandon FF for Chrome back. They are doing this by making a browser that is unappealing to me (and many others actual FF users, not Chrome Users who are the most vocal proponents of Firefox's current direction), a user that has been a FF loyalist since FF version 1.
I am not 100% sure I will switch to another browser, the options are very thin these days but it will be a sad day for me when FF57 is all that is left
Session Manager, which I've used since Firefox 2. To add insult to injury I downgraded to an earlier nightly and it no longer worked either, had to blow away the UI customization config and reinstall the addon for it to re-appear and work again.
Seems they have all the APIs needed for it at the very least approved. It's not like Mozilla just said screw everyone... Let's become chrome. They are putting in the effort to make web extensions viable for even the more advanced uses.
They are making to where a version of TreeTabs are possible, this new API will enable functionality like in Chrome (see my other comment) but it will not be the same.
if I wanted Chrome style Vertical tabs I would have moved to chrome years ago
Seeing as how there is an api in place to have a built in sidebar in firefox, plenty of tab and window API methods available, a way to hide the horizontal tabs at the top of the screen and the developer of treeStyleTabs saying that they will be able to move to webextensions fine... I fail to see how this will be inferior to an XUL extension. Can you elaborate on how the old tree style tabs is different other than using XUL?
Unrelated, but the fact that the developer doesn't get the extension AMO approved and uses eval() all over the place should give some pause as well.
He may well be using it "safely" but it still is a string that is being evaluated so it has many inherent drawbacks.
> Now, the real question is: "why isn't Firefox developing a default Tree Style Tab?"
>
> I think at this point enough people are using it, and it has proven to be a better way to browse.
Not sure there are enough users to justify taking actual mozilla engineers off core problems that are everyone's problems. There is a maintenance burden and associated cost for every feature that mozilla adds to their core product. I think they would rather make the browser extension backend robust enough to allow for those types of extensions without sacrificing stability, performance, and security.
>Unrelated, but the fact that the developer doesn't get the extension AMO approved and uses eval() all over the place should give some pause as well.
He does, it is in the official add-on site, but their approval process is slow, and a few times a Firefox update has broken it and I've had to download the update from the dev's site because it takes a long time to update on the official site.
Just because it's on the site doesn't mean that it's approved... it's marked experimental by the developer to not require a full review with the caveat that any experimental extension is inherently more risky than a reviewed one. The developer lists a few reasons why they don't do the full review and one of those is that they use eval() and that the review takes longer than they deem acceptable. I just said it should give a little bit of pause not that you should wholesale reject using their extension. I just looked over his code and it's quite a lot of code for something that should be fairly straightforward.
It is not part of the UI part of the browser like the XUL TreeStyleTabs but a separate Panel that ends up being buggy and feeling separate from the experience almost like managing your tabs from a separate window
Latest version does multi-processing, e10s is finally here (though it might still get disabled by usage of certain add-ons, I remember I had to force it to stay enabled).
On performance, in the past it felt sluggish, but now Firefox is fast and for my usage patterns it uses less memory than Chrome.
And one thing I really love is the Awesome Bar, which is a pain point every single time I open Chrome. I have a lot of websites I need to return to and in Chrome I end up searching on Google far more than I should. I guess that's the biggest difference between Firefox and Chrome, as Mozilla does not feel obligated to shareholders to extract ads clicks from you (although I hope that whatever they do keeps them afloat).
Also, tab management. I installed "Tab Center" from the Test Pilot and it's awesome. The experiment is now over unfortunately and the code itself for Tab Center isn't compatible with WebExtensions, but there's work going on to port it and that highlights that Firefox's WebExtensions will be more flexible than Chrome, if they aren't already.
But in the end I actually care more about trusting my browser and its maker to protect my interests. I actually trust Google more than I trust other companies, but something feels very wrong for a company to have so much leverage on me. Which is why, as long as I have a choice, I'll always prefer Firefox over Chrome, or Safari, or Edge.